With the widespread use of social applications, the function of short distance discovery becomes more and more important, and users prefer to be promptly informed of their friends who appear or leave around, so as to further establish short distance communication with their friends.
In the prior art, a method for short distance discovery is based on an absolute location of a user. This method requires the user to report in real-time about his location, such as cell ID information or GPS location information of the user, to a certain location server in a network. The server in the network calculates the distance between two users according to the cell ID information of the devices at which the two users locate or the GPS location information; if a certain condition is satisfied, it is determined that the two users are in a “short distance” range. For example, if it is learned according to the cell ID information of two UEs that the two UEs have the same cell ID, then it is determined that the two users are in the “short distance” range, further, the short distance communication may also be established between the two devices in a short distance.
Although the method for obtaining a device in a short distance range according to a cell ID can achieve short distance discovery between devices, the accuracy of discovering a user in a short distance cannot be guaranteed, thereby reducing the user experience when using the short distance discovery.